'The Astronaut Farmer' never really takes flight

A dropout from the astronaut training program builds his own rocket.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
The best you can say about "The Astronaut Farmer," a modest-budget tribute to 1983's "The Right Stuff," is that it errs with heart. It's not a botched horror film, or a didn't-even-try-to-be-better raunchy comedy. It's a family picture with big stars, a big studio behind it and a serious attempt at not being as predictable as it almost is.
It's also a dreadful mismatch of indie "arty" filmmakers and a Hollywood popcorny family formula script. The Polish Brothers, of "Northfork" fame, copy shots, icons and themes from "The Right Stuff," but plainly never got a handle on how to make their quirky screenplay work.
The title, "The Astronaut Farmer" is a pun -- and a real groaner. Billy Bob Thornton plays Charlie Farmer, a rancher and would-be astronaut. He once was in the astronaut training program, but dropped out and came home to rural Texas, the family ranch.
In the years since, he's been raising a family, and raising a rocket in the barn out back. It's a big Mercury-Atlas knockoff, whipped up from cast-off parts from NASA. Farmer has pretty much bankrupted the farm on this fool's errand. He wants to send himself into orbit, with a homemade rocket, a Mercury capsule, a 15-year-old son named Shepard as his Mission Control (run out of a battered Airstream trailer) and the vaguest permission to do so from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Here's the situation
His small town considers him a local character, at best, a loon at worst. His banker is running out of patience. His kids indulge him and his wife (Virginia Madsen) reacts to all this with happy calm, as if his suicidal dream is all that keeps the family together.
The film begins promisingly, with a cowboy, riding the range in a cast-off spacesuit. "The Right Stuff" connection, laconic loners, men's men, riding rockets into the wild blue yonder, is sketched in and then chiseled in stone.
But then "Farmer" veers into some message about what America has become -- tentative, fearful, an insecure homeland where dreamers are crushed under federal bureaucracy and people who say "no" for a living. Government is killing dreams and holding dreamers back, the movie suggests.
Not Charlie, though. He becomes a media darling, then a media target, and the movie turns preachy and conspiratorial.
Willis play part
Bruce Willis re-teams with Billy Bob (they did "Armageddon" and "Bandits"), showing up as a "real" astronaut who knew Charlie way back when. Now, he's here to do Uncle Sam's bidding, and stop this nut. He and Thornton have great fun, the one seeing conspiracies in the government's efforts to stop him from buying rocket fuel, the other fueling that paranoia.
"Do you think they want you to launch this?"
The movie tries to avoid letting the audience think about how patently ridiculous the whole enterprise is by rarely showing Charlie prepping for space-flight, working on the rocket. The laughable, retro, seat-of-the-pants sloppiness of the "science" here will make anybody who loved "October Sky," about the rural teens who learned the science of making rocket motors and helped get us to the moon, grimace.
But Thornton, rubbing off some of his edge and dialing up the country-boy charm (think of his winning turn in the film "Friday Night Lights") almost makes it watchable.
"Somewhere along the line, we stopped believing we can do anything," Charlie drawls, laying out the movie's message.
It's a goofy throwback, a tinkerer's movie saddled with Old West anti-Federalism, black SUVs and feds in sunglasses (J.K. Simmons, Mark Polish and "Napoleon Dynamite's" uncle, Jon Gries) and a notion that we've been legislated and budgeted out of our willingness to take the great risks and do great things.
All of which make one wish they'd been able to make the movie, and the message, come off.